Anti-Climacus

QUOTE:

"THE CASE FOR INSENSITIVITY: If you've spent much time around the newly graduated, you'll find something striking about this younger generation. They have a new religion. It's called "sensitivity." There are plenty of things wrong in human conduct, but by far the greatest sin is "insensitivity." Anything that could faintly unsettle, upset, disturb, unnerve or discombobulate another person according to the Litany of offenses - ethnic, religious, sexual, etc. - must be excised from speech and thought. The reductio ad absurdum of this new creed is to be found in New York States Regents' Exams for graduating high school students. In the New York Times yesterday, we found out that even Isaac Bashevis Singer and Anton Chekhov have been bowdlerized to conform to the new faith. Their writing has been gutted of any conflict, ethnic references, sexual innuendo, and even hedonistic mentions of wine. It's so clarifying when all the fusty puritanisms of new left and old right combine. According to the bureaucrat defending this violation of literature, "The changes are made to satisfy the sensitivity guidelines the department uses, so no student will be 'uncomfortable in a testing situation.'" Doesn't she understand that making students uncomfortable is the point of education? It's precisely when we read something offensive or strange or alien that we start to think, to put ourselves and our myopic lives into a broader context. What our education system is now attempting to do is therefore literally instill incuriosity into children, a stultifying, inoffensive, comfortable state in which all the difficult conflicts of the modern world are conflated into anodyne pabulum. Thank God there are some feisty people with brains ready to expose and fight this. Thank God also for Cathy Popkin, Lionel Trilling professor in the humanities at Columbia. She wrote the Regents: "I implore you to put a stop to the scandalous practice of censoring literary texts, ostensibly in the interest of our students. It is dishonest. It is dangerous. It is an embarrassment. It is the practice of fools." But the fools are now running a large part of the educational asylum. "

-Andrew Sullivan, defending the reasonable use of the academy